Anathema of Venice: Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's
Click here for Full Issue of EIR Volume 33, Number 46, November 17, 2006 EIRFeature ANATHEMA OF VENICE Lorenzo Da Ponte: Mozart’s ‘American’ Librettist by Susan W. Bowen and made a revolution in opera, who was kicked out of Venice by the Inquisition because of his ideas, who, emigrating to The Librettist of Venice; The Remarkable America where he introduced the works of Dante Alighieri Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte; Mozart’s Poet, and Italian opera, and found himself among the circles of the Casanova’s Friend, and Italian Opera’s American System thinkers in Philadelphia and New York, Impresario in America was “not political”? It became obvious that the glaring omis- by Rodney Bolt Edinburgh, U.K.: Bloomsbury, 2006 sion in Rodney Bolt’s book is the “American hypothesis.” 428 pages, hardbound, $29.95 Any truly authentic biography of this Classi- cal scholar, arch-enemy of sophistry, and inde- As the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus fatigable promoter of Mozart approached, I was happy to see the appearance of this creativity in science and new biography of Lorenzo Da Ponte, librettist for Mozart’s art, must needs bring to three famous operas against the European oligarchy, Mar- light that truth which riage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte. The story Venice, even today, of the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte has been entertaining students would wish to suppress: of Italian for two centuries, from his humble roots in the that Lorenzo Da Ponte, Jewish ghetto, beginning in 1749, through his days as a semi- (1749-1838), like Mo- nary student and vice rector and priest, Venetian lover and zart, (1756-91), was a gambler, poet at the Vienna Court of Emperor Joseph II, product of, and also a through his crowning achievement as Mozart’s collaborator champion of the Ameri- in revolutionizing opera; to bookseller, printer, merchant, de- can Revolution and the voted husband, and librettist in London in the 1790s, with Renaissance idea of man stops along the way in Padua, Trieste, Brussels, Holland, Flor- that it represented.
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